T. Boyle: San Miguel

As they climbed, she saw that the path wove its way through a natural canyon, which fell away to the thin muddy margin of a creek some thirty or forty feet below. The sky was a uniform gray. Birds started up from the scrub and shot at a diagonal across the gap of the canyon to vanish out of sight. The mule wheezed and sighed. She felt a cough coming on and fought it, breathing fiercely through her nostrils and holding herself as rigidly as she was able. The rocker groaned, the sled chafed. And then, just when she thought they were going to go on forever, up and up till they circumvented the clouds and reached a whole new continent in the sky, they emerged on a plateau in a blast of wind-driven sand and the house was there.

It took her a moment to get her bearings, the mule kicking up clods, the boy swinging the sled in a wide arc across the yard so that it was facing back down the canyon even as he reached up for the hame of the animal’s collar and jerked it to a stop. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, some sort of quaint ivy-covered cottage out of Constable or Turner, hedges, flowerbeds, a picket fence— a sheepman’s place —but this was something else altogether. This couldn’t be it, could it? She looked to the boy, expecting that he’d let her in on the joke any second now — this was the barn or the servants’ quarters or bunkhouse or whatever they called it and in the next moment he’d be chucking the mule and leading her on to the house itself, of course he would… but then it occurred to her that there were no other structures in sight, no other structures possible even in all that empty expanse. Jimmie was watching her. A gust caught her like a slap in the face. The mule shuddered, lifted its tail and deposited its droppings on the barren ground. She pushed herself up from the chair, stepped down from the sled and strode across the yard.

Her first impression was of nakedness, naked walls struck with penurious little windows, a yard of windblown sand giving onto an infinite vista of sheep-ravaged scrub that radiated out from it in every direction and not a tree or shrub or scrap of ivy in sight. There was nothing even remotely quaint or cozy about it. It might as well have been lifted up in a tornado and set down in the middle of the Arabian Desert. And where were the camels? The women in burnooses? She was so disappointed — stunned, shocked — that she was scarcely aware of the boy as he pushed open the rude gate for her. “You want I should put the things in the parlor?” he asked.

She was in the inner yard now, moving as if in a trance toward the door, which even from this distance she could see had been sloppily cut and hung so that there was a wide gap running across the doorstep like a black horizontal scar. The windowsills were blistered, the panes gone milky with abrasion. A jagged line of dark nailheads ran the length of the clapboards, climbing crazily to the eaves and back down again as if they’d been blown there on the wind, the boards themselves so indifferently whitewashed they gave up the raised grain of the cheap sea-run pine in clotted skeins and whorls that looked like miniature faces staring out at her — or no, leering at her. She recognized this as a delusion and delusions only came when the fever settled on her, but she didn’t feel feverish at the moment, just weak, that was all. Weak and disordered. As if that weren’t enough, just as she was about to lift her foot to the front steps, in the very instant, a quick darting shadow — snake, lizard, rodent? — whipped out in front of her and she had to stifle a scream, but the boy was right there, doing a quick two-step, bringing the heel of his boot down on the thing, which was only gristle and blood in the sequel.

“Ma’am?” The boy was fumbling to pull open the front door for her, wearing a puzzled look — she was the invalid, acting strange, an animated wraith like Miss Havisham, a harpy, a witch, and she knew she had to snap out of it, embrace the positive, be strong and assertive. She willed herself to pass through the door and into the front room, thinking at least there were two stories, at least there was that, and then she was staggered all over again.

Will couldn’t expect her to live here — no one could. The room was uninhabitable, as crude and ugly a place as she’d ever seen in her life. The floorboards were innocent of varnish or even oil and they were deeply scuffed and scoured by the sand, which seemed nearly as comfortable here as in the yard. There were no curtains on the windows. The furniture, such as it was, consisted of half a dozen wooden chairs, a long bare table etched with the marks of heavy usage and a bleached-out sideboard that looked as if it had been salvaged off a ship — which, she would learn, was in fact the case. No rug. No paintings, no china, no decoration of any kind. Worst of all, no one had bothered to cover the walls, which had been crudely whitewashed, apparently from the same bucket that had been put to use on the exterior. This wasn’t a room — it was just an oversized box, a pen, and at the rear of it were two bedrooms the size of anchorites’ cells and an even cruder door that gave onto a lean-to addition that served as the kitchen. Everything smelled of — of what? Sheep . That’s what the place smelled of, as if the whole flock had been using it as a barn.

“Ma’am?”

She came back to herself suddenly — the boy was there still, wanting something. He gave her a pleading look — he was only trying to help, she could see that, only trying to be efficient, to unload the sled and bring it back down for Will and the girls and Adolph to load up again and again so that all they’d brought with them could be arranged here in this sterile comfortless rat-hole of a house that no amount of hope or optimism or good cheer could begin to make right, and she realized, for the second time in as many minutes, that she was making him uneasy. Worse: she was frightening him.

“Yes?”

“Should I—? I mean, do you want that I should — because Captain Waters is going to be wondering where I got myself to and he can be awful sharp sometimes…”

“Yes,” she said, and her voice sounded strange, as if her air passages had been choked off, and she had to struggle to command it. “Go ahead. Do what you must. Shoo, go on!”

The coughing didn’t start till he’d ducked out the door and into the wind-whipped gloom of the day and it carried her to the unfinished stairs that were like the steps in a child’s tree house and on up them to the carpetless bedroom she would share with Will and the sad four-poster bed with its greasy curtains and the counterpane that smelled not of her husband but of sheep — only, and inescapably, of sheep.

It was anger — and despair, that too — that gave her the strength to strip the bedding and tear the bed curtains from their hooks, to ball them up and fling them on the floor for Ida, because what was he thinking, how could he ever imagine she’d regain her strength in a freezing hovel like this as if she were some sort of milkmaid in a bucolic romance? They could have gone to Italy and baked in the sun till her chest was clear, the lesions dried like figs on a tin sheet and the flesh come back to her limbs, her breasts, her hips and abdomen — or even Mexico. A tropical place. A desert. Anyplace but this. His own selfishness was at work here, she knew that in her heart. Even as she sat there on the stained mattress trying to fight down her feelings, coughing and coughing again till her throat was raw, she couldn’t help accusing him. But then she’d been guilty too. She was the one who’d given him the last of her savings, the last of the money left from James’ estate, to buy in here as equal partner with Mills because she knew if she didn’t she would lose him. He was an enthusiast, he wanted to better himself, saw his chance and took it, but he was her husband too and he’d loved her once, loved her still, though she knew she wasn’t much use to him anymore — not beyond what her money could bring, anyway. The thought — and it wasn’t the first time it had come to her — shrank her down till she was nothing, a husk like one of those papery things you saw clinging to the bark after the imago unfurls its wings to beat away on the air.